WARNING: The following quotes and observations are disturbing, grotesque, horrific, and any other really bad adjective you want to use to describe mass murder and the ignorance and hard-hearted elective apathy that allowed it and continues to ignore the pain of women and children. If you are an adult American, you should read about the Kermit Gosnell murder trial and the awful acts that are alleged to have taken place at Mr. Gosnell’s “clinic” in Philadelphia.

JD Mullane: Gosnell, 72, is charged with killing seven born-alive babies and causing the death of Karnamaya Mongar, 41, an immigrant from Nepal who had sought an abortion at his West Philadelphia clinic. The clinic was busy, doing brisk cash business.

Trevin Wax: “The Gosnell case involves gruesome details about living, viable babies having their spinal cords “snipped” outside the womb.”

Kirsten Powers: “Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb — as in a routine late-term abortion — is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.”

Conor Friedersdorf: “It is also a story about a place where, according to the grand jury, women were sent to give birth into toilets; where a doctor casually spread gonorrhea and chlamydiae to unsuspecting women through the reuse of cheap, disposable instruments; an office where a 15-year-old administered anesthesia; an office where former workers admit to playing games when giving patients powerful narcotics; an office where white women were attended to by a doctor and black women were pawned off on clueless untrained staffers.”

Mark Steyn: “This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is killing actual living, gurgling, bouncing babies on an industrial scale – and it barely makes the papers.”

Andrew McCarthy: “Stephen Massof, one of Kermit Gosnell’s fellow butchers,. . . described for the jury the chamber of horrors that was the ‘Women’s Medical Society’ on Lancaster Avenue. There, scores of babies — perhaps hundreds of them — were willfully mutilated after being born alive.”

Finally, this video is called 3801 Lancaster:

“He was respected. This was not a back-alley operation.”

“He was running a . . . late-term abortion clinic.”

I know this is mostly a book blog, but just as I would have been morally culpable to have lived in Hitler’s Germany and to have been silent as Jews were being rounded up and killed, I cannot be silent when we as a nation continue to murder our own children. The killing of newborn and pre-born babies happens every day in abortion “clinics” around the nation. Some of them are just cleaner and more law-abiding, a bit more “humane”, than Gosnell’s torture chamber.

Pray for the women, the people who worked at that abortion mill, Dr. Gosnell, the journalists who covered the story and those who ignored it, and for all of us. May this horror be a turning point that will touch hearts and change minds and bring us to repentance.